Battle on the Greens
From the start, the big (6 ft., 190 lbs.), crew-cropped junior from Ohio State approached last week's 59th U.S. Amateur at the Broadmoor Golf Club in Colorado Springs as though it were just a casual round with his buddies back home in Columbus. Jack Nicklaus, 19, joked with opponents and officials alike, was undaunted by the tricky greens of the 7,010-yd. course hacked out of the eastern slope of the Rampart Range, 6,500 ft. above sea level. Because of the backdrop of jagged peaks, some level greens seemed to slope uphill, some uphill greens seemed flat...

Nicklaus had just the club to back up his long game off the tee: an old-fashioned, hickory-shafted putter, which he had ordered in Scotland last spring... In the semifinals, faced with a 27-ft. putt downhill over a hump, Nicklaus precisely moved his new bat and watched the ball trickle home to eliminate California's Gene Andrews, 2 and 1. "There was no way that ball could get into the cup," complained Andrews, who carried a form chart on every green. "Just no way it could be done."

In the finals [defending champion Charlie] Coe started fast, drilling birdies on the first three holes, led two up after the morning round of 18 holes. But in the afternoon Coe began to wilt. He sent seven of nine tee shots into the rough... Swinging with smooth power, canning his putts with authority, Nicklaus caught Coe on the 21st hole. Going into the 36th, the exhausted Coe and the confident Nicklaus were still tied. The sun was down, and the greens had slowed when Coe chipped for the cup out of a grassed bunker. Normally, the ball would have rolled in, but in the dampening grass it stopped inches away... Then Nicklaus took his new putter and sank his eight-footer for a birdie three and the U.S. Amateur. New champion Nicklaus was the youngest player to win the title in half a century.

Arnold Palmer waited 3½ minutes for this 8-foot putt to drop in the 1962 US Open at Oakmont. It didn't fall. On June 17, 1962 Palmer faced Jack Nicklaus in an 18-hole playoff, and Nicklaus won the Open by 3 strokes, the 1st win of his professional career. Sports Illustrated photo by John G. Zimmerman, from Time Magazine, 6/22/1962. You can read excerpts from the TIME article on the Golf Articles page.